It’s been a long time since Star Wars let us climb into a podracer, fire up two enormous engines, and hope our reflexes are good enough to keep the whole thing in one piece. STAR WARS: Galactic Racer changes that today, blasting its way onto PC and consoles.
As the biggest rogue release of the month, Fuse Games’ new racer brings one of gaming’s biggest licences into the run-based world, while also marking a proper return to Star Wars racing more than 25 years after Star Wars Episode I: Racer. That’s quite a combination, especially when podracing has spent most of those years sitting on the sidelines despite being one of the most memorable parts of The Phantom Menace.
This time, it’s joined by landspeeders, speeder bikes, and skim speeders in an underground racing league built in the Outer Rim after the fall of the Empire. There are rivals to knock out of the way, vehicles to upgrade, routes to choose through each tour, and a campaign where crashing too many times can bring the entire run to an early end.
Welcome to the Galactic League
The Empire is gone, the New Republic is trying to put the galaxy back together, and plenty of people have decided this is a great time to start gambling on extremely dangerous races. That’s where the Galactic League comes in.
You play as Shade, a former racer pulled back into an unsanctioned circuit where syndicates bankroll competitors and every tour gives you another chance to climb the ranks. The campaign follows Shade’s pursuit of champion Kestar Bool, but getting anywhere near him means surviving races across several planets and dealing with plenty of other rivals first.
Tours work like runs, with different routes letting you choose the events you take on and upgrades you pick up along the way. Crashes matter too. Wreck too many times and you can lose your entry ticket, bringing that attempt to an early end. Winning is obviously preferable, and keeping the vehicle in roughly one piece will help.
Podracers Aren’t Your Only Option
There are four types of repulsorcraft to get behind the controls of, and each handles differently. Landspeeders are sturdy and easier to control, making them useful when you’d rather survive somebody slamming into you. Speeder bikes trade that protection for speed and agility, while the new skim speeders sit somewhere between the two and can use a Knife Edge manoeuvre to deal with tight corners.
Then there are the podracers. They’re built for outright speed, with ramjets pushing them even faster and airbrakes helping when a corner is rapidly becoming a wall. You’ll need to balance both if you want to stay ahead without turning your expensive racing machine into several smaller pieces.
Vehicles can be upgraded and customised throughout the campaign too, letting you build around the way you prefer to race rather than simply chasing a higher top speed. And this is the Galactic League, so you don’t have to be polite about overtaking, you can slam into rivals, shunt them off course, and score takedowns while trying to keep yourself out of the scenery.
There’s Plenty to Race After the Campaign
The story isn’t the only place to start wrecking repulsorcraft. Online multiplayer supports up to 12 racers, with cross-platform play bringing PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S players together. Multiplayer runs take you through a series of races before a final season decider, with bots filling any empty spaces.
There’s an Arcade mode too, offering individual challenges across the game’s different vehicles without asking you to commit to another full campaign tour. Times can be compared with friends, giving you another reason to go back when somebody knocks a fraction of a second off a run you were perfectly happy with five minutes ago.
STAR WARS: Galactic Racer launches today on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, with both Standard and Deluxe Editions available. It’s been more than 25 years since Star Wars Episode I: Racer first let us tear around Tatooine at completely unreasonable speeds. Time to start those engines again.